The Right Way to wear a Tie.
Used western clothes go all over the world. This picture from Papua New Guinea (also from Russ Belk) shows a recylcled piece of mens' wear. Wait, I think I once saw Dominique Bouchet wearing that tie!
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Wear the Best - Wear the West!
Soccer (football) is the most popular game in Brazil. The Kamaiura native people of the Amazon have substituted soccer balls for parrot feathers. I think the result is kind of striking! (Colors: no. 22)
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Get a Life.
Jonathan Schroeder sent me this amazing postcard at Arlandastad Outlet Village – “Sweden’s first American Outlet store.”
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Pig Tattoos.
This is art, not consumer goods. But funny! The artist is Wim Delvoyes and the museum is Middelheim in Antwerp, Belgium. Courtesy of Tine Vinge François.
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Mr. and Mrs. Average American.
A real industrial propaganda poster from the late 1940s, courtesy of Jonathan Schroeder. It was the time of MORE=BETTER.
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It is hard for me to imagine having so many self-winding watches that I would worry about them stopping and needing to be reset. It is even harder to imagine being so indolent and rich that I would rather pay $100 for a machine to shake my watch, than have to reset it once in a while. Someone needs to shake these people and remind them that 2 billion people live on less than 1$ a day. |
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Name Yourself for a Commodity?
Here is a corner of a program from the 1997 Indian Market in Samta Fe, New Mexico. |
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Welcome to Fakeville!
This is a sign at the center of Nashville Indiana, a town devoted almost exclusively to the sales of "country" souvenirs and crafts. The marketing of a neo-traditional shopping mall as "a visit with the past" is a characteristic of an American "Disneyesque" blurring of the boundaries between the real and the fake, as described so well by Jean Baudrillard. The long-term question is - does parasitic marketing "steal" our past and leave us without real roots? |
Bulls Balls for your appliances.
I have a hard time saying anything coherent about effigy bull's testicles cast from steel which are made to hang from the rear bumper of a truck. As an artifact they say so much about the culture of the USA...and a careful reading of the website where they sell these things is a tour through what consumer culture has done to masculinity (and vice versa). |
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Have you accepted Jesus as your personal shopper? Despite the content of religious teachings about poverty being holy, for the last few thousand years, consumerism and religion have been locked in tight embrace. Worship and faith promote all kinds of consuming behavior, whether its building a new temple to Baal, importing war captives to sacrifice to Huitzilopochtli, or cooking a huge dish of green bean casserole for the church social. |
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